I am looking forward to checking out the new SharePoint 2013 features hosted within a CloudShare sandbox. CloudShare provides various SharePoint hosted environments 'on tap' for faster deployment and testing - a free trial is well worth exploring.

Last year, for SharePoint Saturday New York 2011 #SPSNYC , I had submitted 3 proposed developer sessions and all three were rejected. Apparently, there were 7 SharePoint governance sessions in a track that crowded out the developers but four of the governance sessions were presented by speakers from the event sponsors themselves (sort of buying your way into a voluntary community event and being paid for it).